Distractions Along the Road

Day 4.1

That morning, B was ecstatic. His late-night drive up to Tunnel View, a turnout affording panoramic vistas of the Yosmite Valley, had given him and Tripod a soul-shaking opportunity to catch the heavens in their glory. 

“I’ve already been to church and had my spiritual experience … last night I got some great shots of the night sky …” he said. AJ smiled, thankful and happy to see his wonder. 

The family breakfasted in the car as they drove to their first destination of the day. AJ ate leftover salad, sunflower seeds and half an apple while B and the boys munched on Pop Tarts. In a satisfying instance of ultimate preparedness and justification of suitcase space, she used her fork/spoon/knife utility thingy by cutting the apple and eating her salad without the use of plastic utensils. 

As she watched the forested hills whiz by along the winding road, her mind went back to the trees. Always the trees. What do trees see? Are humans like quarks to them? Going to and fro so fast that humans can’t be seen by their slow, patient eyes? 

All the splendor in wood, rock, water and flora … could it ever be owned? Even the 1/3 acre of her yard couldn’t really be called hers, it was much older and would go on living much longer. How can a person own something so near timeless? It’s like a mosquito having the deed to your neck. He gets a deed to the fleshy property to keep other skeeters away, but it doesn’t matter to the human except for the annoying bug bite the insect leaves in the landscape. 

Olmstead Point was their first stop, which included the bare faces of mountains of white-with-black-specks granite. The turn-off was dotted with cars and a few RVs, and a curiously high proportion of visitors who spoke German. 

 "This is steep, but I'm glad it's not a Lake Michigan dune," AJ said. It was a challenging and steep climb, but easier than walking up a giant pile of sand. 

A few small, hardy trees grew where decades earlier they had landed as a seed, doing the best they could where they were: between a rock and a harder rock. AJ sat on an affording boulder and looked over the land. It was too much grandeur to take in and comprehend what she was seeing. 

Lying before AJ in the distance was a valley of granite slabs sprinkled with trees, a scene whose far reaches were hazy and undefined by morning fog. With her phone, she snapped a few pictures of things closer and slightly more comprehensible, like the bark of a beautifully struggling conifer. 

B and One had taken Tripod down the proper trail for pictures, but had soon joined AJ and Two on their rocky mountain where B properly photographed the tough, clinging trees. 

When they had their sensory fill of the stoney setting, they headed down the smooth mountain of rock. AJ cautioned the youngest, “Don’t run! Like at the swimming pool, don’t run ‘cause when you fall, you’ll get really hurt. You’ll get a bucketful of boo-boos.”

“I’m not running!” Two said, denying his obvious trot down the granite. “And anyhow, it’s more like you’ll get a pail full of boo-boos.”

Two chimed in, “No, a shovel-full.”

The brothers One (16) and Two (9) never full-on, no-holds-barred fought, probably because of the seven-year-age difference and their corresponding body sizes. But they argued, nit-picked and debated logical fallacies, and as AJ was reminded at that moment, they could even find points to argue within her hyperbolical metaphors.

A short drive up the road was Tenaya Lake, where the family parked and stepped down to the water’s edge. As AJ sat trying to translate the sights into words, the repetition of substance stood out to her. God worked like Taco Bell (well, really vice versa), taking a few ingredients– rock, water, trees, plants (or C, N, P, etc)–and put them into different combinations for significantly varying outcomes. AJ’s Michigan landscape contained water, rocks, trees and plants, but it looked nothing like the Sierra Nevadas, nothing like what she saw when she looked up from her notebook as she sat on a huge lake-side boulder. 

Two looked longingly at the clear rippling water of the lake. “I really hope there are no pennies in the lake,” he said. A strange sentiment, unless you knew him. 

“Oh, look, Two! A penny,” One exclaimed, pointing into the water. 

“Whaaa? Awwww,” Two whines, “I wanted to find it!” A found penny was the best thing for Two, but he had to set eyes on it first to make it really count as luck. These seemingly inconsequential treasures always lit up his day. It was like winning, like winning a penny and the prestige of finding it first. 

“No, just kidding. I put it there. It’s the one I found in Muir Woods,” One revealed the trick. 

Everyone knows the adage, “You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” Everyone who lives around large bodies of water and has kids know this one: “You can’t take kids to water without them getting wet. Doesn’t matter how cold it is, or why you’re there, they will not stay dry.” With this adage in mind, B and AJ acquiesced when Two asked to take off his shoes and wade in the water, especially since he clinched his request with, “I’ll just end up getting wet anyway, might as well keep my socks and shoes dry …” 

Damp feet and a bunch of lake photographs later, they were on the road again, slowly making their way out of Yosemite, stop by stop. Indecisions about whether to eat lunch at the small lunch stand was solved by the fact that they weren’t serving lunch yet. They moved down the road as the boys snacked on 1/2 a Power Bar, searching for signs of their next destination. 

Because of trail construction, they couldn’t park where B had planned, so they parked by the horse stables, and wandered along a rocky, sandy, sparsely treed trail before coming to Soda Springs, a very honestly titled spot. 

Weird little springs bubbled from the ground amid coppery pools, where all the rocks wore a halo of white minerals left behind by evaporation. As they approached the site, a guide was explaining the area to a tour group. These people were decked out in camp-hefty backpacks adorned with water bottles swaying from carabiners, carrying walking sticks, wearing trail-type hats and made-for-hiking boots. The tour guide explained the mystery of the springs, and how geologists don’t understand why they are there and about a guy who at one time built a little cabin over them and planned on selling the water. 

After the tour group left, AJ, Two and One sat on the little bench nearby, taking in the surroundings and waiting while B and Tripod were done documenting the spot. 

Soon, Soda Springs enticed a single hiker who came by and joined AJ and Two on the bench. He took out a glass mason jar and filled it with the bubbling water, then sat back with a sigh as he gulped it down.

“Best water on earth,” he said. B had always said that people are more friendly on the hiking trail. Whether it was the water or the setting, the man seemed relaxed and happy. He enjoyed his libation, then moved up to the visitors center, leaving his backpack behind. The visitor’s center is housed in a building that is more than 100 years old, build of sturdy timber and rocks, and seemed under-utilized for holding a few books, tables, chairs and maps. 

The family retraced the trail back to their car, bought a lunch of salads, hamburgers and hotdogs, and ate on the road. Their next stop lay outside of Yosemite, at a marvel of more human origins than natural, nestled in the bare ragged hills at 8,000 feet above sea level. 

Thanks for reading!